


Hold Your Heavy Heart High

by GwenTheTribble



Series: I Won't Teach You to be a Man (You're Just Going to Have to be Strong Instead) [6]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Car Accidents, Character Study, Cisswap, Description of Injuries, Female Tony Stark, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-08-07
Packaged: 2018-04-13 09:52:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4517382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenTheTribble/pseuds/GwenTheTribble
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her father told her something when she was eight years old.  She took it to heart.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hold Your Heavy Heart High

                Her father said she may have to take what was hers. Audey learns this lesson well. No one is going to hand you things. Take them. If you want your blood, spill theirs. If you want your home, dare them to take your house. If you want your heart, well. Maybe her father hadn’t used those exact words.

                Maybe her father had said it three whiskeys into a prototype of something that would be pointed at people and pay for the whiskey in the glass and be the reason for it being poured. Maybe her father had said it looking at her, finally looking at her, and maybe that is why it sticks.

                Maybe Howard Stark had looked at his only child and seen the woman she was to become, or one of them. Maybe he saw her at seventeen and grief stricken, designing something that would kill from far away. Maybe he saw her at nineteen, in that club, with those people, with those drugs. Maybe he saw her at twenty-one in a cave. Maybe he saw her at twenty-one build a suit and start to stand for something. Maybe he saw her at twenty-two fly that nuke into space. Maybe he saw her at twenty-five, dancing at her wedding to a tall boy. Maybe.

                Maybe all he had said was this; “it’s gonna be yours Audrey. All yours.”

                That’s all she needed to hear.

\---------------------------

                It isn’t necessarily that Audey wants the company itself. It’s that no one is going to take it from her.

                She would have run that company with Obie for the rest of his life. She really would have. He was uncle Obie.   But she wanted too much. She got the big office, and she actually used it. Sometimes. She was making decisions. It wasn’t Obie and the good puppet heir Stark, this time around. It was Obie Stane, who was having to hand her the reigns. Not as often as you’d think. Not as rare as you’d suppose.

                Tony had that company dropped in his lap and Uncle Obie had been there to catch it. Audey seized it, wrapped her manicured hand around it and bit the rotten apple, anything to make it hers.

\-------------------------

She had been in California when the car crashed. Jarvis had been driving. She could picture it. Late at night, her parents in the backseat, not talking. Maybe her dad had a scotch. Maybe her mom had a sherry. Her dad had been thinking about a new order. The military needed something with delayed results. Her mom had been thinking about a gala, or brunch. An orphanage, perhaps. Or maybe one of them was on their phone, checking messages and emails. The car would have been dark, and they had been far enough from the city to see stars. In her head, nobody looked at them. In her head, an animal runs across the road and Jarvis swerved to avoid it.

The police report had detailed damages, injuries. In her head she could feel the exact moment they realized they were about to die. She could feel her mom’s diamond ring. It had been cut to perfection. She itches where it embedded in her mom’s forehead. For the month after, her neck wrenches, her chest aches.

Do you want to know what the bravest thing about that month was? It was not several press conferences, or her taking the company, or attending the funeral, or getting up in the morning. It was reading everything in the police report without clawing at where Jarvis’s leg had snapped in four places. Without gripping her father’s fractured jaw.  

\----------------------------------

                Audey Stark has had a scream caught at the back of her throat for as long as she could remember.

                Or maybe that wasn’t quite right. Maybe the girl herself was the scream. Maybe she was the crazed laughter after tragedy.

                When Obie rips out her heart she drags herself on her belly across broken glass to replace it. She does it quietly. She was too busy straining her ears for her heartbeat.

\-----------------------------------

                After the funeral Audey stayed inside for two weeks. She stopped letting Happy drive her. She turned her blinker on a mile away from turns and then drove too fast for people to see it.

                If Audey Stark was running away she wanted someone to care enough to follow. If Audey Stark was running away she wanted no one to know.

                Starks didn’t run away. They stood there, and did things, and had iron in their spines that snapped when the car rolled.

\---------------------------------

                If you want your heart. If you want your heart.

                Well. Her father didn’t use those exact words.

\--------------------------------

                So maybe what her father had meant when he said that it would be all hers meant that it was her guilt. Meant that it was her genetic disposition to alcohol and substance abuse. Her empty mansion. Maybe he had been three whiskeys into a prototype of something that would be pointed at people and pay for the whiskey in the glass and be the reason for it being poured. Maybe her father had said it looking at her, finally looking at her, and maybe that is why it sticks.

                Maybe he was looking at his eight-year-old and meaning that she was an heiress of the atomic bomb.

                Maybe she knew exactly what he meant.

\------------------------------

                Audey spends four years between the crash and Afghanistan running a company with Obie and drinking and fucking and spending.   She buys art and goes to galas with Pepper, who manages to sometimes stop her from being tomorrow’s scandal. She kills people in far off sandy places.   She thinks about killing herself, right where she is. She would really like too.

\---------------------------------

                If you want your heart, take it.

\--------------------------------

                Obie rips her heart out and leaves her to die. He is still Obie. Uncle Obie, who went to her one and only dance recital when she was seven.

\-----------------------------

                She would really like to die.

                When she is in a cave, they threaten to kill her if she doesn’t make them a missile. She builds armor instead.

                When her heart is ripped out, she drags herself across broken glass on her belly to replace it.

                When her heart is killing her, she rediscovers an element to fix it.

                It’s not so much that she wants to live. It’s that she won’t die like that.

\------------------------------

                The thing about the arc reactor is that in the simplest terms, it holds shrapnel in her heart. Any further and it will kill her. But what people don’t know is that Yinsen had to carve at her lungs to put it in. It is essentially, what keeps her heart beating.

                But the reactor doesn’t beat. So either her heart stopped beating in Afghanistan, or it’s going too fast to feel it.

                The only certainty is that her heart is bleeding, always bleeding.

\-----------------------------

                If you want your heart, go find it. If you don’t like that one, forge a new one. Any tools and supplies you have will do.

\--------------------------------

                She had been in California when the car crashed. Across the country.

                What nearly ended her had been a missile that killed you a week later.

                Things can kill from a distance.

\-----------------------------

                When she is in a cave, they threaten to kill her if she doesn’t make them a missile. She builds armor instead.

                When her heart is ripped out, she drags herself across broken glass on her belly to replace it.

                When her heart is killing her, she rediscovers an element to fix it.

                This is how badly she wants to live.

\--------------------------

People would have said that her stopping the making of weapons was enough. That donating her blood money to charity would have absolved her, eventually.

                No one says she has to be a hero. So she isn’t one. She’s a war maker. An heiress of the atomic bomb.

\--------------------------------

                If you want your heart. If you can’t find it.

                Make it bleed, and then let it keep bleeding.

                Make it glow.

\------------------------------

                If you want your heart, take it.


End file.
